I'm glad to be back onstream in columnist capacity over at Bookhugger, and this month the chaps were kind enough to put in my lap a stimulating brief, namely a response to a fascinating piece on a useful topic written by Molly Flatt (pictured right) over at the affiliated Bookdiva. Said topic is the influence of one's gender upon one's writing and reading choices/preferences. And I daresay we all have a share in that subject. Pictured left, of course, is the late Norman Mailer and his late wife, the last of the six women he married, Norris Church Mailer. And you can imagine that I brought Norman into this discussion, without, I hope, doing anyone a disservice...
My monthly Bookhugger column will resume next week after a short and unplanned winter break, and I’ll be writing about a fascinating biography of the former Australian cricket captain Kim Hughes: a dashing batsman in his day but, sadly, remembered more for the tears he shed at the press conference where he resigned the captaincy after his team took a pasting off the invincible West Indies side of 1984. Boys don’t cry, as they say generally, and I guess Australian boys in particular are made to fear reprisals and eternal scorn should they succumb, not least when the matter in hand is sport. It’s a mite more acceptable/manly, I think, to shed a small tear in victory than in defeat – even to let go with the full waterworks, like Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins after the 1982 world snooker final. Or if, say, some staunch veteran colleague is hanging up his boots or hearing his last hurrah – in which case a fella on the field or in the stands could be permitted to look a little dewy round the eyes. But the idea that as a brawny sort of a sportsman you might be really and truly upset about something bad that’s happened... Jesus mate, you might as well walk yourself round to the Ladies’ Room for a session with the powder-puff, before your comrades or the team’s supporters drive you there with burning torches. One alleged exception to this rule is Paul Gascoigne, whose desperate, blinking, red-eyed blubbing following his yellow card in the semi-final of Italia 1990 was widely felt to speak for the feelings of England fans as they contemplated a quite colossal disappointment. For me the most utterly wrenching instance of a sportsman’s visible distress is without doubt Pete Sampras’s wracked effort to play the fifth set of his 1995 Australian Open quarter-final against Jim Courier, the tears streaming down his face even as he prepared to serve. His coach Tim Gullikson had been diagnosed with four separate brain tumours that week, and Sampras had been running daily between the tournament venue and the hospital. In the match, having gone two sets down he fought back to level, whereupon some airhead in the crowd thought it a considerate exhortation to yell, ‘Come on Pete, do it for your coach...’ The story is told in the documentary excerpt below, and watching Sampras wrestle with it , even now, is highly affecting. The highest level of individual sport is a lonely, intense, super-concentrated universe with scarcely an inch of space for error of weakness. I had though Sampras overpoweringly dull, if brilliant, as a player, and so hardly thought of him as a person, but post-1995 I became his keenest fan, the revelation of his deep feeling helping me belatedly to see him as the supreme athlete and competitor he undoubtedly was.
My October Bookhugger column went up last week, so this is a belated nod, but in a sense I was distracted somewhat by it having elicited one or two comments, which are, after all, what we live for... The nub of the piece is: how do we get 14-year-olds to sit still and read Great Expectations, since this would be so damn good for them? (And I don't mean the version by Kathy Acker, laudable as that was in its own way.) My answer, I suppose, is 'Teach Dickens together with Dostoyevsky...' But then thankfully when I go to work tomorrow it won't be in order to stand up before a sullen group of 14-year-olds and ask them what they think the author really meant... In any case, this question must come from within, not without.
This month at Bookhugger I write about what I've mostly been doing this month as a writer (not to say last month, and several before that) - which is completing and revising the manuscript of my second novel, The Possessions of Doctor Forrest. Much, much more to come on that subject - possibly a whole other blog... As I say in the piece, Amazon now summarises the plot and reports the book "hitting stores" on May 19 2011.
My Bookhugger column last month (last week, frankly) was inspired by the wonderful BBC4 archive series In Their Own Words, culled from the Corporation's back-catalogue of interviews with major British 20th-century novelists. Television does indeed compel us to look at books, so long as the programme-making and writing in question have sufficient spark. It took a while for TV to 'do' book-chat without too many excruciating pauses, but P.G.Wodehouse, here c. mid-1950s, biting amiably but hard on the end of every query, shows himself to be ahead of his time, whatever the culture once thought.
For my Bookhugger column this month I was resolved already to write on Rob Young's splendid Electric Eden (of which you will surely read more elsewhere this month, the excellent blog-site in support of which is here.) But since music and its celebration in writing was the matter, and since Faber and Faber have serious form in this area, I thought I'd broaden the piece so as to say a little of the part in the story played by Pete Townshend, Faber's second-most-famous editor in the firm's history after Thomas Stearns Eliot. Townshend is also appropriate to any discussion of English music specifically, or of music as a higher (or lower, Chthonic) power, and such is the terrain of Rob Young's book. Anyhow, in writing up the piece I discovered on YouTube the 1985 South Bank Show on Townshend, and just wished to share with you a) the sheer genius of opening the show on an extreme close-up of Pete's vibrating strings as they are struck, and b) the commensurate genius of letting the emergent tune, Pete's 'Give Blood', run on over the opening credits as a replacement theme to the episode.
My column for Bookhugger this month is about Christopher Hitchens and his memoir Hitch-22; or at least about one aspect of the book and of Hitchens' life, which is the making and unmaking of friends as a consequence of one's political convictions. There are many other aspects of the book I would have happily addressed too, but then I hope one day I may find myself down the pub with someone else who's read it... This photo from 1990 of Hitchens and his second wife Carol Blue is by Annie Liebovitz. Enough said.
The second of my regular monthly essays on literary themes is now up at Bookhuggers: What is to be Done? On political arguments in book-form. The strapline is: 'With one week to go until the culmination of a fascinating General Election, Richard T. Kelly considers the art of the political argument in book form.' The theme of the piece, I suppose, is this (in light of the choices available to the voter): 'The differences are certainly there, in the party manifestoes and the much-vaunted leaders’ debates on TV. But for those of us who fancy a longer mull over matters, wouldn’t our deliberations be enriched by some fiery polemical writing, from all quarters and factions?' The title is of course pinched from Lenin (who pinched it himself), and by happy coincidence the excellent Oliver Kamm of the Times put the same title on his blog post of yesterday explaining (in somewhat heavy-hearted tones) why he will be voting Labour next Thursday...
As 'promised' last week, my first Bookhugger column is now posted up here and trailered like so: The Richard T. Kelly Column: Gothic, The Beast That Will Not Die For the first of his exclusive monthly columns for Bookhugger, novelist and screenwriter Richard T. Kelly explores the enduring popularity of the Gothic in literature and film – from Bram Stoker to Stephanie Meyer. May you find something of interest therein...
As of next week I'll be writing a monthly column for the excellent Bookhugger online literary magazine, this to address various matters literary, writers and their books, the publishing business and all what have you. Bookhugger is a splendid platform for book fans, and I'm looking forward to being part of it and having this outlet for expression. In advance of the first column going up I've filled in the site's regular writer's questionnaire, which they call 'The Book That...', a little listing of tomes (Dostoyevsky, Mailer, Mishima et al) that have meant something to me in years gone by, and indeed still do. My responses are here.
I'm glad to be back onstream in columnist capacity over at Bookhugger, and this month the chaps were kind enough to put in my lap a stimulating brief, namely a response to a fascinating piece on a useful topic written by Molly Flatt (pictured right) over at the affiliated Bookdiva. Said topic is the influence of one's gender upon one's writing and reading choices/preferences. And I daresay we all have a share in that subject. Pictured left, of course, is the late Norman Mailer and his late wife, the last of the six women he married, Norris Church Mailer. And you can imagine that I brought Norman into this discussion, without, I hope, doing anyone a disservice...
